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Road logs Rio+20

By Gustavo Marin There have already been a good deal of post-Rio+20 articles. A large majority of them have expressed discontentment, disappointment, the evidence of failure foretold, the inadequacy of the governments’ final declaration, etc. Some of these articles, digging deeper, have not stopped at establishing that the governments were not able to reach an [...]

By Jan-Gustav Strandenaes, Stakeholder Forum IFSD – the Institutional Framework for Sustainable Development – and good governance came out of Rio+20 strengthened. As one of the main agenda-points it enjoys an entire section in the Outcome Document, ‘The Future We Want’. References to governance are interspersed throughout the document and already in paragraph 10, in [...]

By Derek Osborn, Stakeholder Forum Early in 2012, Stakeholder Forum in collaboration with several other civil society organisations in the UK drew up a checklist of 13 key objectives that we hoped to see achieved at Rio+20. In the following scorecard I have tried to assess how far the Rio+20 Outcome Document measured up to [...]

By World Watch Institute “The Rio conference is over before it has even started.” This was a common reaction among many participants and observers at Rio+20, following the release of what became the final conference agreement, The Future We Want, by the Brazilian hosts three days before the end of the gathering. This happened even [...]

By Iddri What has come out of Rio+20? A sense of realism, certainly. While the final text does not match up to the challenges at stake, it is a relatively true reflection of the current state of play in international cooperation, and reveals the limits of the multilateral cooperation system inherited from 1946. Indeed, globalisation [...]

By George Monbiot It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth’s living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who [...]

By José Pedro Martins “We need — with worldwide mobilization — to fight for complete reform of socio-environmental governance, because the current one doesn’t correspond at all to the interests of communities around the globe and of Mother Earth.” That’s how Ailton Krenak, one of the best known indigenous leaders in Brazil and member of [...]

By Peter Utting is Deputy Director of UNRISD. This viewpoint reflects on the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), known as Rio+20, held in June. It looks at, among other things, the reactions to the idea of green economy, one of the conference’s main themes; the role of corporations; and the positioning of equity [...]

By Martin Khor The Rio+20 summit from 13 to 22 June was disappointing to many, but it could still succeed through the mandated follow-up actions. The South Centre’s Executive Director gives an in-depth assessment. The UN Conference on Sustainable Development, more popularly known as Rio+20, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit, [...]

By ETC Group Governments mark 50 years of failure…and a couple of nano-steps forward For a lot of the world, ‘Rio+20’ signifies the big environmental jamboree taking place this week in Brazil – before the Olympics and after the Queen’s Jubilee. For the thousands of negotiators and civil society observers, including ETC Group, who have [...]